HomeArtificial IntelligencearXiv:2605.29756

LFQ: Logit-aware Final-block Quantization for Boosting the Generation Quality of Low-Bit Quantized LLMs

Artificial Intelligence2026-05v1license

Abstract

As large language models continue to scale, low-bit weight-only post-training quantization (PTQ) offers a practical solution to their memory-efficient deployment. Although block-wise PTQ is capable of matching the full-precision (FP) baseline on basic language modeling and understanding, its quality is degraded for generative tasks -- especially at longer responses and extended chains of thought, which is critical in boosting task accuracy. We attribute this shortfall to two factors: (i) the omission of the unembedding layer (the LM head) in block-wise optimization and (ii) the reliance on the mean squared error (MSE) objective. Both factors cause the token probability distribution of the quantized model to misalign with that of the FP model, yielding notable accuracy drops on text generation benchmarks. To rectify the discrepancy, we introduce Logit-aware Final-block Quantization (LFQ), a simple yet effective enhancement to block-wise PTQ that quantizes the final Transformer block by minimizing the cross-entropy between the logits of the FP model and those of its quantized counterpart. By aligning token probabilities at the logit level in the final block, LFQ consistently improves the accuracy of complex generation tasks over state-of-the-art block-wise PTQ across diverse model families, while maintaining parity with FP baselines on language modeling and understanding.

Comments: Accepted to ICML 2026

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.29756,
  title  = {LFQ: Logit-aware Final-block Quantization for Boosting the Generation Quality of Low-Bit Quantized LLMs},
  author = {Jung Hyun Lee and June Yong Yang and Jungwook Choi and Eunho Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.29756},
  year   = {2026}
}